Some time ago I was browsing through several old books, once belonging to a deceased relative, when I came upon one that particularly caught my eye. It was a fine old copy of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, undated, and probably printed in the first decade of the last century. Leafing through its pages I was faced with the guilty fact that somehow, in the course of my education and of my own personal reading, I had never touched upon Dante. Convicted, I vowed to remedy that error. By the end of the first canto, however, I knew that this particular volume would not do—it was far too brittle with age to be read cover to cover. And so, as usual, I set off for Barnes & Noble.

My text would be the Everyman’s Library version of the Comedy, a translation by Allen Mandelbaum of Wake Forest University. This exceptional version includes an extensive collection of endnotes, a necessity for comprehending Dante’s complex world, both the three-fold one he journeys in, guided by Virgil and Beatrice—Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso—and the more mundane world he travelled as a man in Italy. Armed with these notes and an expert, modern translation, I set out on my own journey of discovery, 710 years after Dante found himself at the end of his rope in a dark and menacing forest.

I found that two challenges first confront the reader. First is Dante’s complex cosmography, which is largely foreign to our own concepts of an afterlife. Then again, it helps to recall that to Dante, there was no known world outside of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. The rest of the globe was a complete mystery, so why not find heaven, hell, and purgatory there? Even with this mindset it takes imagination to picture the epic landscape that makes up Dante’s journey. For the modern-day reader, Gregory McNamee came upon a multimedia resource that can be of assistance.

The second challenge stems from Dante’s immersion in the politics—both social and religious—of his day. To say the least, Florence in the late 13th century was a place of conflict, and the exiled Dante had plenty of axes to grind. He is not afraid to name names, and indeed many of his enemies find themselves agonizing in hell.

Be joyous, Florence, you are great indeed,

for over sea and land you beat your wings;

through every part of Hell your name extends!

But they are not alone. Dante severely criticizes the church of his day, including the pope of the era, Boniface VIII. For making a mockery of God’s grace and for what Dante sees as the sin of simony, Boniface and similar popes will find themselves in hell. Despite our image of this age as one of static religious views, Dante boldly takes aim at church leadership, and even toys with established theological points. In Dante’s afterlife, even pagans have a chance at redemption (though ironically unbaptized infants do not).

The reader is struck by how Dante straddles two very different eras in writing the Comedy. He touches upon modernity, largely in the very fact that he writes his masterpiece in Italian. As he creates this classic of his vulgar tongue, he addresses contemporary themes and takes hard stands on the issues of his time. Yet a classical thread still weaves through the work. Medusa is in hell; Arachne in purgatory. And perhaps most shocking of all, at the worst of hell’s terrors, held in the clutches of Satan himself, the reader finds not only Judas—who might be expected there—but also two other traitors: Brutus and Cassius. And of course Dante’s guide through hell and purgatory is none other than the great poet whom he sees as his own archetype, Virgil.

But it was in paradise—Paradiso—that I finally gleamed the most insight through Dante’s work. Early in his journey through heaven, in its outer circle, he encounters those who, through no fault of their own, were unable to keep their vows. He asks one of these saintly beings on heaven’s fringes a logical question:

“But tell me: though you’re happy here, do you

desire a higher place in order to

see more and to be still more close to Him?”

She answers that to the residents of heaven there is no longing to be in a higher place. “You’ll see no such discord in these spheres; to live in love is—here—necessity.” Suddenly, Dante has an epiphany:

Then it was clear to me how every place

in Heaven is in Paradise, though grace

does not rain equally from the High Good.

In reading these words, I asked myself how I, blessed as I am, can complain about this and that in my life, considering that in my own faith’s understanding I am within the sphere of a loving God, and just like this angelic being, how can I see myself as closer or farther away from such a power. If I am in communion with God at all, then I have nothing more to ask.

And thus I learned something from Dante, as so many have done, for over seven hundred years.